Article November 21, 1914 Issue

The critic asks, Is it not a perilous thing to adopt Christian Science?...

Ezra W. Palmer

Colorado Springs (Col.) Telegraph

The critic asks, Is it not a perilous thing to adopt Christian Science? The answer to that question is found in results, and these are apparent in every city and in almost every hamlet of the nation. Men and women are made better Christians because of Christian Science. They have learned to love the Bible and to strive to follow its holy teachings. Their lives have been transformed from a material to a spiritual basis, and they have found a religion which destroys poverty, business worry, sickness, and sin, and gives them harmony, peace, and health. In Christian Science they have found no shipwreck of their Christian faith. On the contrary, their faith has become deep-toned, sure, a firm grasp of the profound essentials, a scientific understanding of God which naturally and freely expresses itself in healing sickness and sin in themselves and others.

Christian Science does not deny the death and resurrection of Christ Jesus, but points to his demonstration in overcoming death and arising from the grave as the great example for the redemption of humanity. "The cross," said Mrs. Eddy, "is the central emblem of history. It is the lodestar in the demonstration of Christian healing,—the demonstration by which sin and sickness are destroyed" (Science and Health, p. 238). Nor does Christian Science deny the atonement. The word atonement occurs but once in the New Testament, in Romans v. 11. In the American Standard Version the word atonement in this passage is translated "reconciliation," and the word is similarly translated in several passages in the King James Version. Jesus overcame sin, sickness, death and the grave, to show mortals the way, but not to do their work for them. "Work out your own salvation," said Paul, and this is the Christian Science standpoint. We work out our own salvation by following the example of Jesus in destroying sin, disease, and death. By so doing we "put off the old man with his deeds," and are reconciled to God—prove man's unity, his at-one-ment, now and forever with God.

This critic stumbles over the use of the terms reality and unreality as employed in Christian Science. Only God and His creations are real, for they only are unchanging, perfect, spiritual, and eternal. The unlikeness of God is the unreal. Thus sin, sickness, poverty, and death are contrary to the nature of God, and are destroyed by "the sword of the Spirit." To human sense sin and sickness are real, and they so continue until the human mind rises to a clearer knowledge of the divine Mind. Christian Science does not deny prayer to a personal God, as this critic declares. The term personal, when applied to God as frequently employed, carries with it a sense of anthropomorphism; Christian Scientists do not employ it with that meaning. "If the term personality, as applied to God, means infinite personality, then God is infinite Person,—in the sense of infinite personality, but not in the lower sense" (Science and Health, p. 116).

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